Are You Mentally Ill? NAMI Hopes So
Dissident Voice – October 11, 2014 By Martha Rosenberg One out of four people has a “mental illness.” You hear the statistic all the time….
Dissident Voice – October 11, 2014 By Martha Rosenberg One out of four people has a “mental illness.” You hear the statistic all the time….
200 years after psychiatry was recognized as a medical discipline, a stark question persists: Is psychiatry credible?
The ever-expanding list of so-called psychiatric conditions included in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) may soon include “relational disorders,” or mental illnesses supposedly attributed to two or more people involved in a relationship together.
According to the official definition, relational disorders are “persistent and painful patterns of feelings, behavior, and perceptions involving two or more partners in an important personal relationship.” A married couple, for instance, that continually fights would constitute a relational disorder, as would a troubled parent-child relationship.
If recognized and included in the manual, relational disorders will be the first psychiatric condition that involves more than one person. It will also be the first condition that exists only between two or more people, and not in a single individual.
It happens every day to people of all ages, but there are certain people who in death shine a spotlight on paradigms of cultural fragmentation and social inconsistency, even though most of us don’t see it at first.
Even while America and the rest of the world celebrate these icons’ lives, these “stars” illume a sad state of the American condition, and in some ways perhaps focus a beam on the collective human suffering. These public figures ante up the unnecessary ultimate price for a peoples that more and more feel alone in a crowd and are turning to Big Pharma to sate our appetites for some kind of reprieve from our psychic suffering. We are looking for that missing mirror of wholeness, and many believe it’s in a bottle.
On the outset, let me say I am not against all prescription drugs. Just most psychotropic medicines. I am passionately against the mass epidemic promotion and consumption of drugs in a world that cannot seem to produce unbiased numbers that substantiate efficacy in the realm of pill popping bliss.
It has come to my attention that I am mentally ill.
I always knew I was neurotic – who isn’t? – but it still comes as something of a surprise to learn that I am suffering from an actual mental illness. Others, perhaps, will not be surprised in the least.
The particular mental illness that afflicts me was added only recently to the so-called Bible of psychiatry, otherwise known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This is the big reference book that officially catalogues all the mental illnesses recognized by modern psychiatry. The latest edition is nearly 1,000 pages. You would have to be almost pathologically normal to find nothing in there that applies to you.